Joys & Sorrows of a Baby Boomer

Joys and Sorrows of a Baby Boomer is a hilarious coming of age true story that takes place in the fifties and early sixties in a small tobacco town in eastern North Carolina. Boomers will relate to seeing their very first television set, listening to rock and roll music on forty-five records, cruising the hangouts and paying fifteen cents for a hot dog all-the-way. All is tranquil and simple in this sleepy little town of Rocky Mount. Or is it? Beneath the calm and prim fa ade of its citizens reside racial tensions, superstitions, and wild party people. Nothing is as it appears to be. It's all confusing to a young girl surviving within her own dysfunctional family, and dealing with an alcoholic father and a codependent mother. S.A. Paradis guides us through a simpler era when kids entertained themselves with tacky parties, homemade circuses complete with trapeze acts and trained animals that ran wild and fired-up bags of poo thrown onto front porches. Travel along on Carolina beach trips during hurricanes and hear about the devastation through the eyes of a young child. From playing in drainpipes to traipsing through the local cemetery barefoot, kids experienced freedom, self-reliance and confidence in an age of relative safety. S.A Paradis has a frolicking good time and she entices the reader along as she relives the great boomer years and presents us with a blast from the past. Vintage photographs are included.

S.A. Paradis was born and raised in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where she absorbed the coastal culture that she loves. She was reared by a rigid Baptist mother and a liberal hell-raising father, who was an Irish railroad worker. It set the stage for a baffling, and often humorous childhood that refused to make any sense to her. Determined to laugh instead of cry, Ms. Paradis states that she could find humor in a graveyard, and in fact she did that very thing in her book. Ms. Paradis received a B.A. in psychology at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. She is a member of the Alpha Chi honorary society, Hypatia literary society, and is the recipient of the psychology medal of excellence. She has dedicated a lifetime to social services as Head Start teacher, casemanager for United Cerebral Palsy, and Orchard Park Senior Center. She now resides in glorious Myrtle Beach, South Carolina with her husband and two rescue kitties.